The race for Ebola drugs: pharmaceuticals, security and global health governance

The international Ebola response mirrors two broader trends in global health governance: (1) the framing of infectious disease outbreaks as a security threat; and (2) a tendency to respond by providing medicines and vaccines. This article identifies three mechanisms that interlink these trends. First, securitisation encourages technological policy responses. Second, it creates an exceptional political space in which pharmaceutical development can be freed from constraints. Third, it creates an institutional architecture that facilitates pharmaceutical policy responses. The ways in which the securitisation of health reinforces pharmaceutical policy strategies must, the article concludes, be included in ongoing efforts to evaluate them normatively and politically

CERN helps Grid cmputing into the mainstream

CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, has launched the seocnd phase of Openlab, its partnership with IT companies for the development of advanced computing facilities. The industrial partners in this phase, Hewlett Packard, Intel and Oracle, will help build on the experience from the last three years when Openlab worked on cluster and Grid computing (1 page